Spring blossom and silly things

This has been the second (and last) week of my Easter holidays and I've spent a distressing amount of it marking my Advanced Higher students’ dissertations and creative writing.

However, on Monday I walked to collect the car from being mended and saw - above - the Pentland hills with some cherry blossom,


a forsythia bush in full bloom

and this flower shop. All very springlike.

On Wednesday I had coffee with my friend Maggie and she told me about something silly she did with her spectacles.

And today I had lunch in Haddington with some other friends and we did something embarrassing.

Maggie’s silly thing? She likes having candles in her house, and has discovered that a good way to get wax splashes off the glass candle-holders is to put these in the microwave to melt the wax. Works a treat, she tells me.

The other day she’d been tutoring a student and her brain was rather frazzled. She then rushed to pack to go away for a few days with friends, blew out a candle – and wax spattered on to her spectacles. So, still thinking about her tutorial session and her little holiday, she popped them in the microwave.

The lenses, she reports, were fine. The titanium frames melted completely.

The embarrassing thing? Today, five friends and I were lunching in Haddington, which is a small town in East Lothian, east of Edinburgh. Above you see the river that we walk along. My friend Janet lives near the town and some months ago, on a similar occasion, she took us to look at a show house (ie a new house, fully furnished to show prospective buyers what houses in a development can look like). Various of us have occasional thoughts about retiring to Haddington or somewhere round about. And it's always fun to have a snoop round a show house.

Today, she announced that she had another show house for us to look at on our after-lunch walk. There it was, in a row of new houses – the one with a For Sale notice in the window and another saying Open Viewing.

So we went up the path and opened the door – six of us, talking loudly as only six teachers who’ve known each other since 1973 can talk. We stood in the hall and looked round. I thought to myself that it was odd that on the wall was a school photo.

Someone called from upstairs – the sales lady, clearly. Then she came down, looking a bit surprised. Janet asked if we could see the house; the lady agreed but said, “It’s just that… people don’t usually walk straight in.”

Because it turned out that…no – it wasn’t a show house. It was this lady’s home. Yes, she was selling it but she was also living in it and had been for a year. The houses were newish, but not actually brand new as Janet had thought.

Were we looking for a house? asked the lady (who was clearly hoping to sell it, though equally clearly didn’t think we looked like six women who were necessarily going to buy a house together). No, no, we said, backing out rapidly. We were just… so sorry… goodbye.

And we continued our walk. Giggling. But a bit horrified.